


if you were church (i’d get on my knees)

by nightcalling



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Church Sex, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:40:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24294496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightcalling/pseuds/nightcalling
Summary: Joe isn’t exactly sure how they got here, in this precise position, but he’s not complaining. Not when Leslie has him pressed against the inner wall of the confession booth, face and chest digging into the wood, and feeling like he’s about to be taken apart fully-clothed.
Relationships: Joseph Blake/Lieutenant Leslie
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	if you were church (i’d get on my knees)

**Author's Note:**

> This...started off as a super horny pwp and then accidentally veered into softny with the tiniest hint of a backstory towards the end, as is my brand (hence the reason for the canon-divergence/post-canon tags, but it's barely there). Thank you to the one and only Sam Mendes for throwing out post-canon priest Leslie as a plausibility in the BAFTA Masterclass chat, you’re the reason this tumbled out of me in a fevered couple of hours.
> 
> Title is from “Church” by Fall Out Boy.

Joe isn’t exactly sure how they got here, in this precise position, but he’s not complaining. Not when Leslie has him pressed against the inner wall of the confession booth, face and chest digging into the wood, and feeling like he’s about to be taken apart fully-clothed.

Leslie has a finger to the back of Joe’s neck and begins tracing a line down Joe’s spine. It starts with one, then splits into two, as he skirts past the shoulder blades, then three, into the curve of his back, then four, up the other side of the dip, and then five, until his entire palm is splayed possessively at his arse.

“You’re beautiful,” Leslie murmurs, accenting it with an etch of his fingers into flesh.

Joe tries resisting the pressure, he really does, but his self-control is limited and his body arches for Leslie, like it was meant to respond only to him.

“Yeah?” Joe asks, already breathless from the heat of Leslie’s hand through his thin trousers. “You want to show me what you mean by that?”

He thinks he hears a chuckle out of Leslie. He’s not sure—his back is turned towards Leslie, his arse out and his head propped against the wall, so he can only make his best guess. If anybody were to walk in on them now, he’s certain they would both be expelled from the church, from the town, and probably from the world forever.

It’s a thrilling sensation, one that doesn’t frighten him in the least. In fact, the very thought of it only serves to make his cock harder.

Leslie has certainly noticed that by now, if the hand reaching around Joe’s waist to unbutton his trousers is anything to go by. When Leslie finally frees Joe’s cock from his garments, he also shoves Joe’s shirt up and trousers down at the same time with the other. Joe has no clue how Leslie manages that, but it means Leslie is both efficient _and_ smooth, and this realization fuels the fire burning in Joe’s gut as strongly as Leslie’s touches themselves.

“You’re beautiful,” Leslie repeats with a stroke of Joe’s cock. “I’ll show you just how much.”

Before Joe can even recover from that first touch, Leslie dips a hand at the crease of his arse and begins working a finger in. He presses his chest against Joe’s back as he does so, perhaps out of necessity due to the small space, but that’s not what Joe is focused on. No—the expanse of Leslie’s broad, toned chest feels incredible (and warm, and safe) to be sure, even through Leslie’s robes, but it’s the dig of Leslie’s cross into his back that’s making Joe feel like he’s about to lose his bloody mind.

The more Leslie strokes him, works him open with those delicate fingers, the more the cross’s cold metal chills his skin. Joe can’t wait until it reaches the same temperature as the blood rushing through his veins, until it melds completely with his flesh.

“Look at you,” Leslie whispers, thumb pressing at the tip of Joe’s cock. “Already this wet. Being so good for me.”

Joe nearly stumbles and collapses from those words, from the way Leslie applies a light squeeze to his cock, and it makes him look down on reflex. The sight of Leslie’s hand, part of a pair of two that’ve touched every page of the Holy Bible, that’ve bathed in holy water, and that’ve pressed together in holy prayer, now making magic on his skin—Joe could come from that alone.

His entire body spikes with white-hot shock and arousal as Leslie presses four fingers deep into him, hitting the spot that Joe can never really manage by himself.

“Christ,” Joe chokes out. He grinds onto Leslie’s fingers because he wants more, more, _more_. “More.”

“Patience is a virtue,” Leslie says mildly. He withdraws his fingers, all of them, even withdraws the hand around Joe’s cock, then exits the booth. Leslie leaves him there, arse up and red-faced, like a fucking bastard.

“Where,” Joe manages to get out in between his breaths. “Where are you—”

"Wait there,” Leslie’s voice distantly echoes. 

At least, that’s what Joe thinks he says—Leslie is too far away and the booth is designed for blocking out noise, after all. It simultaneously angers and turns him on, the thought that he can’t do anything but wait here obediently. He’s learned to keep a pretty accurate internal clock due to long days of waiting for nights to pass during the war, so he counts the minutes. One, two, three, four, five. Ten, fifteen, twenty.

This is getting ridiculous. What’s even more ridiculous is that his cock is still hard, he’s still leaking, and he can still feel the ghost of Leslie’s fingers inside him, Leslie’s cross branding his back.

Well, if Leslie’s not coming back anytime soon, then he’ll just have to make do.

Joe reaches a hand behind himself and works two fingers in right off the bat—he’s still loose from before, so he quickly makes it three. He presses against the wall in an attempt to apply additional friction to his cock that’s not just from his fingernails, but the angle makes it an impossible feat, and the burn isn’t nearly enough.

Where the _hell_ is that bastard?

Just when he’s about to say fuck it and grab a candlestick from the nearby altar, Leslie appears, blocking the light radiating in through the glass panels of the church. It casts down upon him in a myriad of red and yellow halos, and Joe is pretty certain that he’s greeting an angel and a devil at the same time.

“Going somewhere?” Leslie asks. It sounds like a routine question he’d ask any regular parishioner of the church. _What did you think of the service? Where are you headed after this? It’s a nice day for a stroll in the park, isn’t it?_

Fuck him, honestly.

“You took your time,” Joe says, pulling Leslie in by that collar that’s sitting way too tightly around his throat and bringing their faces close together, but only enough for their noses to touch. “You find what you were looking for?”

“I did, as a matter of fact.” Leslie leans back slightly to reveal a small bottle. “But, I have to correct what you said.”

“What?” Joe releases himself to gravity and thumps back against the wall of the booth, bringing Leslie with him. “Is this going to be another one of your little sermons?”

Leslie tilts his head, and the entire movement reeks of irritation, amusement, fondness. 

“No,” Leslie says. “What I meant was, all I did was go fetch something. But it’s not what I was looking for.”

The confusion takes over the lust in Joe’s body, just for a moment. “What? Stop speaking in riddles.”

“What I’ve been looking for,” Leslie begins again, eyes softening slightly, enough of a disparity from his expression before for Joe to understand what’s coming before he continues, “it’s you.”

Joe freezes. If not his entire body, then his heartbeat, at the very least. Leslie is—Leslie is certainly joking. Right?

“Is that alright?” Leslie asks. He brings his empty hand up to cup Joe’s cheek, and Joe is reminded once again of the Holy Bible, the holy water, the holy prayer.

Joe nods. _Yes._

Leslie smiles. Joe flips through his mental catalogue—Leslie has a different smile for different types of people. There’s the one he directs at deliberate troublemakers: indignant, ruthless, malevolent. There’s the one he directs at particularly talkative widows: irked, tolerant, understanding. There’s the one he directs at small children: kind, playful, patient.

There’s the one Leslie is directing at him now, one that Joe’s never seen before: relieved, thankful, enamored.

Joe quickly adds it to the list, before he can forget it.

“So, you found me,” Joe says, mirroring Leslie’s smile. “You want to show me what you mean by that?”

He expects Leslie to return to his quips, or to spin him around and pin him to the wall like before. What he does not expect is Leslie going down on both knees like he does during every morning prayer and looking back up at him with expectant eyes, like Joe is something to be worshipped.

“Can I?” Leslie asks. He places the bottle gently on the floor of the booth before bracketing Joe’s hips lightly with his hands.

Joe gazes into those dark brown eyes and finds light at the end of them. He nods again.

Without another word, Leslie pulls down Joe’s trousers even farther, dips his head, and takes him into his mouth. Joe didn’t think it was possible, but it feels better than Leslie’s hand around his cock or Leslie’s hands inside him. 

His hands find the nape of Leslie’s neck in the middle of his thrusts into Leslie’s throat. He lets them lay there until they become restless, then curls his fingers into Leslie’s hair.

“Fuck,” he says, when Leslie releases him briefly for air. “Don’t—Don’t stop. Keep going.”

“Don’t worry your pretty head about that,” Leslie says, wrapping a hand around the base of Joe’s cock and stroking once. “I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.”

Before Joe can get a, “then crack on already, you arse” out, Leslie runs his tongue from the base to the tip, then takes him into his mouth again. Joe pulls at Leslie’s hair the same time that he thumps his head against the wall, forcing Leslie down even more onto him with the motion. He senses the moment his cock breaches deep into Leslie’s throat, and that, along with the squeeze that Leslie applies to the base, is all it takes for Joe to give in and release.

Leslie stays there until Joe finishes, a long drag of several seconds, bleeding into minutes. When Leslie pulls back, there’s a trail of come bridging the tip of Joe’s cock and Leslie’s bottom lip, and Joe nearly comes again from that sight alone.

“You—” Joe says, then coughs because he miscalculated how much air he’d needed to breathe. “You do this often?”

Leslie wipes his mouth with his sleeve— _his sleeve!_ —and smirks. “Is that your way of telling me you liked it?”

 _Liked_ it? Joe drops to his knees and hauls Leslie in by the cross and collar, kissing him deep until he covers his tongue with the taste of himself.

“Does that answer it for you?” Joe asks when they break.

Leslie leans in for another kiss, a light and chaste one, much too light for the situation.

“Good. But I’m not done with you.” Leslie picks up the neglected bottle off the ground and pops open the top with his thumb. “Open your legs.”

Well, he doesn’t need to be told twice. Joe obeys, pushing them as far apart as they can go. He’d be embarrassed at how it looks if he hadn’t already been dreaming about this every night in the first place—but Leslie doesn’t need to know that.

Leslie peels Joe’s trousers completely off, tossing them haphazardly out the booth—Joe chokes down a laugh at the gesture—and pulls off his own robes. It takes Leslie awhile because there are _so many fucking layers_ , but patience is a virtue, and eventually, Joe’s patience is rewarded with the sight of Leslie slicking himself up with the oil.

Joe does get impatient while Leslie is apparently taking all the time in the world to get ready, the bloody tease, so he steals the bottle, pours some on his own fingers, and reaches down to his arse to help the process along. He catches the way Leslie’s pupils blow wide the moment he shoves three fingers into himself—only possible due to the result of good work from before, Joe decides—and begins moaning in tandem with his thrusts.

“Come on,” Joe groans out, mind already going hazy again from the sensation. “Don’t want me to come again before you stick that in me, do you?”

Leslie grabs a hold of Joe’s wrist, stilling Joe mid-thrust. “Then get that out of there so I can fuck you properly.”

Well, he _definitely_ doesn’t need to be told twice now, either. Joe removes his fingers and doesn’t even have the time to mourn the emptiness before Leslie aligns himself and sinks in, one fluid motion that sends Joe toppling backward.

Leslie catches him with his arms before he falls completely, and when Joe looks up, he sees himself reflected in those dark eyes. Leslie doesn’t move, stays there, cock halfway in, waiting for something. Waiting for—

“Fuck me,” Joe pleads. _Fuck me_ , he repeats with his eyes, then grinds down as much as he can from this position. It’s then that Leslie finally pushes all the way in, all the way to the hilt.

And, this—this tops it all, tops Leslie’s hand, his fingers, his mouth. Nothing can compare to the way Leslie’s cock fills him up, like a missing puzzle piece that Joe’s been waiting for all his life. Is this what people mean when they say they’re saved by the good Lord?

He never thought he’d ever find a reason to believe again, not after the war, but right now, in this very moment, with Leslie inside him and all around him, he thinks he may have been wrong.

He cups Leslie’s face with his hands, as gently as he can muster, as gently as Leslie cupped his face before. 

“Thank you,” Joe says, kissing Leslie. The taste of himself is long gone, but what’s replaced it is something far sweeter and far more intoxicating—the taste of Leslie himself.

Leslie kisses him back, tongue shoving deeper than his cock. He leans one arm against the wall, leaves the other wrapped around Joe’s waist, pulls out to the tip, then thrusts back in with a snap of his hips. Somehow, Leslie manages to hit that spot on the first try, and Joe nearly blacks out from the pleasure.

“Bloody Christ,” Joe moans, grabbing onto Leslie’s shoulders. He tightens his grip and wraps his legs around Leslie’s waist. “Do that again.”

Leslie does it again—and again, and again, and again, until Joe loses track of the number of times. All that’s helping him keep time is the explosion of stars in his vision, mixed in with the sweat growing on Leslie’s forehead and the fading light illuminating Leslie’s figure. Is it nearing dusk? Has the sun gone down? Joe honestly has no clue, and he doesn’t care—all he cares about is the press of Leslie’s body against his own, and the tender expression written all over Leslie’s face.

How is Leslie even managing that look in this situation? Joe doesn’t get the chance to figure it out before Leslie pushes in with one particularly deliberate thrust, one that’s harder than the previous ones, before Joe cries out into Leslie’s neck and confesses his secrets for the second time of the day.

The feeling of Leslie releasing inside him has him coming more than usual, and again, Joe would be embarrassed if it weren’t for the fact that he’d been dreaming about it regularly.

Joe strokes the back of Leslie’s neck as Leslie fucks through his own climax, his entire body shuddering from the waves of pleasure. He smiles and hugs Leslie closer, feeling their rapid heartbeats racing alongside each other.

After Leslie finally pulls out, leaving a trace of come on the floor and all over his robe that’s strewn about, Joe bursts out laughing.

“What?” Leslie asks, tired and wary.

“Nothing.” Joe stifles the last of his giggles. “Just, ah—I hope that won’t be too difficult to clean.”

Leslie looks down around them, then glances back up with an unimpressed expression. “You think too little of me if you don’t think I know how to get stains out easily.”

For some reason, that makes Joe bubble back up with laughter. “So, you _do_ do this often.”

Leslie sighs, as if he’s already regretting his actions. “You know I don’t.”

“No?” Joe breathes in and out, calming himself back down.

“No.” Leslie sits down cross-legged. It’s a strange sight, like they’re casually lounging on the sofa in his flat, or having a picnic under a tree, or something. “It’s usually just—ah, just myself.”

He looks away, then, off in the direction of the confession window, and flushes pink.

“Are you—” Joe’s mind is suddenly filled with images of Leslie by himself in the booth, wanking and fingering himself and doing whatever else with his own hands. “Really?”

“Yes.” Leslie huffs. “Why’s that so hard to believe?”

“I just—” Joe shoves those images away before he comes for the third time. “I thought you’d be more popular, I suppose.”

It’s Leslie’s turn to bark out a laugh this time. “Oh, people have made advances.”

“But?”

“But, like I said, what I’ve been looking for—” Leslie turns his head. “It’s you.”

Joe thinks back to the first time he saw Leslie standing there at the front of the church, long after the war had ended, long after Tom had healed from his stomach wound and they began attending mass again. He thinks back to Tom opening his eyes incredulously, blurting out a “Lieutenant?” in front of the fifty or so other parishioners on a quiet Sunday morning. He thinks back to Tom introducing Leslie to him with a “and this is my big brother, looks just like me, a little older,” and Leslie appraising him with a certain interest in his eyes that Joe had attributed to the relief of being in the presence of a fellow officer.

He thinks back to the way they traded stories after service, Leslie revealing his stash of whisky— _Is that even allowed?_ Joe had asked once, to which Leslie only responded by filling up two glasses and handing one to him—and Joe revealing his fear of losing Tom in the war, of losing himself. He thinks back to late nights in Leslie’s study, early mornings in the garden outside, sunny afternoons telling jokes and trying to get Leslie to laugh, only for Leslie to tell one back and catch him off-guard. He thinks back to waking up from dreams of Leslie’s hands on his own, Leslie’s lips pressed against his, Leslie deep inside him, and tries to reconcile all of that with today.

He decides that there’s no point thinking about any of that, because what matters is this moment right now. What matters is what’s real.

“Well, then I’m glad you found me,” Joe says. He runs a hand through Leslie’s hair, still damp but starting to dry from the minutes ticking by, and leans in to kiss those lips one more time.

Leslie chases after him when Joe leans back, and Joe once again finds himself pressed against the wall of the booth, but this time facing the direction he’s supposed to be in—towards Leslie.

“I was lying earlier,” Leslie says, when they part. He leans his forehead against Joe’s. “Stains are bloody fucking hard to get out.”

Joe laughs. Maybe his life didn’t end with the war, after all—in fact, maybe it’s just starting.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, Sam, hmu if you ever need ideas for a sequel.


End file.
